


O'Hara's Haunted House

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2020 [4]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: Blood, Drama, Friendship, Gen, Haunted Houses, Horror, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Stabbing, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:14:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24933595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Rook, Pratt, and Hudson need some supplies from O’Hara’s Haunted House.
Relationships: Female Deputy & Joey Hudson & Staci Pratt
Series: hc_bingo fanfiction fills 2020 [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1789369
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	O'Hara's Haunted House

“Oh hell no.”  
  
Hudson shook her head, jaw tight.  
  
“Hudson-”  
  
“Nope, _fuck this_ , I am not going in there. Not for a golden gun with infinite ammo.”  
  
“Oh, come on, you love Halloween!”  
  
“Yeah, Halloween- not fuckin’ O’Hara’s batshit set-up. The guy has issues.”  
  
“Guys!” Rook interrupted. “None of us are getting in. The power’s dead.”  
  
“I don’t think it’s dead,” Pratt said, turning and tracking the cables as they led into the house. “I think we can turn it on inside.”  
  
“ _No_. No way.”  
  
“Joey, for _fuck’s_ sake-”  
  
“We need the ammo,” Rook jumped in quickly before they could start up again. “We’re too low, and if we’re going deeper into Faith’s territory we’re going to need it. Scuttlebutt says O’Hara has a stash in the barn, so…” She shrugged apologetically.  
  
Hudson covered her face. “Fine. Just- Let’s get this over with.”  
  
O’Hara’s house was strangely gutted, giving the impression that it hadn’t really been inhabited for a while. “Was he doing renovations in here or something?” Rook asked, a little taken aback at the lack of trappings. It looked like a house that hadn’t been properly lived in even before the Peggies rolled in.  
  
“Who knows,” Pratt muttered as they climbed the stairs. “The guy _does_ have issues. Honestly, he spent so much time either wandering around the county or working on that haunted house, I don’t know if he was too concerned with home furnishings.”  
  
“So, when you say that O’Hara’s got ‘issues’,” Rook said, “I assume you mean ‘worse than the usual Hope County ‘issues’’. You know, like… Flamethrowers and crazy alien shit.”  
  
“Oh yeah, _big_ _time_ ,” Hudson chortled.  
  
“He’s weird,” Pratt agreed. “Not, like, ‘Halloween obsessed’ weird, but ‘I’m pretty sure he’s got at least one body buried somewhere on the property’ weird.”  
  
“I had to follow up a noise complaint on him once,” Hudson said flatly. “He had a bunch of mannequins in lawn-chairs outside the barn. They were wearing lipstick. The lipstick was smudged. Do the math.”  
  
“No thank you,” Rook said, almost wishing she hadn’t asked now. The wire led up to the attic, and hooked up to a big, clunky switch on the wall. “Why put this here? If he’s going to be running a haunted house, wouldn’t it be smarter to keep it on the ground-level where it’s easier to reach?”  
  
Hudson let out another low laugh. “You think he actually got regular _customers_ here? Oh Rook, that’s so cute.”  
  
So… O’Hara was just running a haunted house for the hell of it? Not the weirdest thing Rook had ever heard of, but with the mannequins story and the wandering around the county bit, she was starting to get a general picture of the kind of guy O’Hara was: The unsettling, eccentric guy that every town had at least one of (and cities, hundreds that infested the subways and other public spaces) that had a way of making everyone around them insanely uncomfortable.  
  
She was starting to get why Hudson didn’t want to go into the barn.  
  
Rook flipped the switch; within a few seconds, the lights decorating the barn sprung to life. From a speaker on the barn’s roof, corny carnival music started playing.  
  
“Guys?” Pratt said weakly, grabbing Hudson and Rook by the shoulders and shaking them roughly. “Guys, guys, did you see that?”  
  
“Not funny,” Hudson snapped.  
  
“I’m not kidding, there was someone in the window!” Pratt hissed.  
  
“Was it O’Hara?” Rook asked.  
  
“I… I couldn’t tell.” Pratt swallowed. “The, uh, the face… The guy’s face looked kinda funny.”  
  
“Funny how?”  
  
“Like… Weird. Like he had face-paint on, maybe? It was hard to see from so far away, and there are bars on the window.” He shrugged uneasily.  
  
“I swear, Pratt,” Hudson growled through clenched teeth. “If you’re screwing with me, I will abso _lutely_ -”  
  
“Maybe you were just seeing things,” Rook suggested quickly. “Or… Maybe O’Hara locked himself inside, to stay safe from the cult?”  
  
“I don’t know which would be worse,” Hudson muttered. “A Peggie or O’Hara.” When they had climbed back down to the attraction’s entrance, she lost some of her irritation and gained a more obvious anxiety. “Do we really have to go in this way? Can we just- I don’t know- knock down a wall with a shovel, shoot one out even?”  
  
“They’re reinforced. We’ll bring every Peggie in a five-mile radius down on our heads if we try to blow a hole in the wall, especially since Joseph’s gunning for us now.”  
  
“I think he’s gunning for me more than you guys,” Rook assured quietly. “I’m the one who killed his brothers.”  
  
Hudson snorted. “Only because you got to them first.”  
  
She and Pratt stood back as Rook pulled the door open. The corny carnival-esque music that was playing was even louder inside. “I mean… If we had to turn on the power to get inside, chances are the Peggies couldn’t get in either, right?”  
  
“That’s certainly a theory,” Pratt acknowledged dryly.  
  
Rook sucked in a deep breath, and then squared her shoulders and walked into the haunted house.  
  
It was obvious that this had been used for commercial purposes at some point, at least: There was a podium with a mannequin stationed behind it, probably for taking tickets, right inside the door. A sour, rotting smell made Rook grimace and wrinkle her nose- maybe an animal had died in here somewhere. The pathway twisted into a tunnel with laser-lights shining from the ceiling; at the end of the tunnel was a little graveyard behind a fence, smoke covering the ground. Rook hugged the wall, noticing a shape beneath the smoke. “Guys, be careful, I think there’s a-”  
  
“ _RAAAAW!_ ”  
  
A figure sprung up from the graveyard as Hudson exited the tunnel, mouth open in a snarl and hands raised, fingers curled to form claws.  
  
Hudson shrieked, whirling around and jumping into Pratt’s arms. “Bullshit!” She squeaked, a half-funny, half-sad opposite of her usual confidence. “Bullshit bullshit bullshit!”  
  
“It’s just a dummy!” Pratt exclaimed, patting her back and laughing weakly even though he’d lost a lot of color. “It’s just a dummy. Just a dummy.”  
  
Rook, still shaking a little, leaned forward and examined the dummy. There was something really _curious_ about this thing, something that made it stand out from your standard mannequin or robot…  
  
Oh.  
  
It had Peggie tattoos.  
  
Rook drew back, eyeing the dummy curiously. A dark, gruesome thought occurred to her, and she quickly dismissed it. There was no way; this was a haunted house that had clearly been used for the public before. It served O’Hara to use dummies and models that looked as realistic as possible. And really, Eden’s Gate was scarier than any monster could realistically be.  
  
(She hoped.)  
  
Rook crept around the corner, looking down the hall with her gun raised. It was dark- not surprising, but still anxiety-inducing- but she didn’t see anyone or anything up ahead. Incidentally, she nearly had a heart-attack when a window lit up to her left and more dummies began to rattle at the Plexiglas. She hugged the opposite wall, confident that it was a solid wall of wood; nearby, Pratt was advancing with Hudson clutching his hand, eyes squeezed shut.  
  
“There’s a jump-scare up ahead,” Rook warned, noticing a large, upcoming gap in the wall of the long hallway ahead.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Uh…” She edged forward, and only jumped a little this time when the front end of a freaking _car_ jerked forward, headlights and horn blaring. Rook pressed back against the wall, waiting for it to withdraw, and saw another window on the same chunk of wall the other one had been on. There was a single, lone dummy behind the window- its back was to the glass, a silhouette in the dark, and it gave Rook that same, eerie uncomfortable feeling the Peggie dummy had.  
  
The next turn in the hall had a dummy on a bed that sat up, arms outstretched, when they passed by. Pratt lingered for a moment, frowning. “Hey, does this one look kind of… Familiar to you?” He asked, giving the bed a little kick.  
  
“Nah,” Rook supplied.  
  
“Hudson?”  
  
“I’m not looking,” Hudson insisted.  
  
“No, seriously- it’s not scary. The dummy just looks… Weirdly familiar.”  
  
Hudson’s eyes peeked open. Upon confirming that there really was nothing else ready to jump out at her, she warily leaned in to examine the dummy more closely. “I mean, I guess I’d say it looks kind of like Marla Hanscom.”  
  
“Who’s that?”  
  
“Bag lady at the local supermarket,” Pratt supplied, leaning back now as though uncomfortable. “Lives on the eastern edge of the county, on the other side of the mountain range. I haven’t seen her since the takeover.”  
  
Hudson mirrored his discomfort now, and began pushing against his back, urging him forward. “Well, I guess we know who O’Hara was imagining when he was kissing those dummies. _Go_.”  
  
As they got further into the haunted house, Rook couldn’t help but notice that that smell she’d noticed at the beginning was getting thicker and far, far worse- something had _definitely_ died in here. A small zig-zag in the hallway (past a low-effort taxidermy wolf rigged up with a speaker) brought them to another obvious scare. “See?” Rook chuckled, trying to sound confident as she stepped forward and a light clicked on. “It’s no big deal: We can see it coming, so it’s no big deal. Not scary at-”  
  
“ _Rook!_ ”  
  
Rook let out a screech and jumped back against the wall, a hand flying to her hip. Her fingers came back wet and bloody, and when she tried to straighten herself up pain raced through her waist, hip, and upper thigh. Hudson and Pratt immediately raced over, dropping down beside her in the corner that opened into the next hallway. “Rook, shit, what happened?”  
  
“It was a real knife!” Hudson exclaimed. “Are you _fucking_ with me? The fucking robot was holding a _real knife!_ ”  
  
Rook peered past the other deputies to see: The dummy was posed over a couch with a slumped figure on it; and when the scene was triggered, it would rush to the edge of the display and stab at the air right beyond it. Dimly, Rook could see a smear of blood glinting on the blade as the dummy stabbed it mechanically at the air.  
  
“Is he allowed to do that?” She whispered as Pratt wrestled her shirt and jeans open. “O’Hara? He can’t be allowed to do that. He’d get sued into the next decade.”  
  
“I don’t think it’s too bad,” Pratt remarked as Hudson kept her flashlight trained on Rook’s wound. “I’ll have to stitch it just in case. It seems like it just grazed you, but that knife was fucking _sharp._ If there were a little more force behind it, or if it had hit your neck…”  
  
He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.  
  
Hudson helped Rook up and braced her as they follow Pratt down the hall, weaseling past some mannequins set up in their path. None of them had heads, so Rook couldn’t tell if they were the same ones that Hudson had seen the lipstick on. “Dummy slicing a…” Pratt pulled a face. “…Dog? I think this is a dog; a _real_ fucking dog, judging from the god-awful smell.”  
  
_Okay, so it **was** a dead animal. _  
  
Rook was just going to go right ahead and keep telling herself that.  
  
_BANG_.  
  
All three of them jumped, and Pratt rounded the corner up ahead with his gun raised. After a moment, he lowered it. “There was a dummy, but I don’t think that was- Shit! Sunlight!” Pratt guided them forward, and he was right: Sunlight came from a hatch in the ceiling to their right (to their left, a dummy tacked onto the ceiling popped its head up, but Rook and Hudson barely noticed).  
  
Pratt and Hudson more or less had to drag/push Rook up through the hatch, difficult as it was for her to maneuver with the injury to her side. She was breathless by the time they managed to haul her through the hole, and blood had really started to soak through her shirt. Pratt moved her aside so that Hudson could come up, and incidentally the oldest deputy was the first to get a good look around the attic.  
  
“Oh _fuck_.”  
  
O’Hara’s attic was divided into two parts: The front-half where the trap-door was and the back-half that faced away from the house. The front-half was simple: Had some pallets, some stacks of hay that built up to the small window near the ceiling, and some tarps and assorted things one would expect to find in a barn.  
  
And then there was the _back_ -half.  
  
There was a desk with a computer and some TV monitors, as well as a radio- normal enough.  
  
There was also a bed-frame with no mattress or sheets, with cuffs attached to the rails and a dark, dark stain soaking the floor beneath it; several mannequins, all of which were pointed towards the bed along with a camera on a tripod; and, of course, a bathtub full of bloody rags. This was eerily juxtaposed with the single red balloon hovering over the desk nearby.  
  
“You know, I don’t want to say ‘ _I told you so_ ’- I really don’t want to be that guy, but you know what? I _fucking_ told you so!” Hudson snarled, flinging out a hand to gesture to the blood-splatter across the wood beneath the bed-frame.  
  
Hudson cautiously peered out the window, looking for whoever had just hightailed it; Rook hobbled to the chair near the bed, picking up a piece of paper sitting neatly on the cushion. It read:  
  
_“you have the fear of god you need the fear of THE DEVIL you need to FEAR IT_  
  
_you take a young person and you take their body and mind_  
  
_you use their empty corpses to find more young people whose bodies you can steal no no NO no no_  
  
_you will wish your mind was scooped out of your body because when IT is through with your bodies YOU WON’T WANT THEM ANYMORE”_  
  
Oh no.  
  
Oh, no, no, no.  
  
_I hate being right, I **hate being right!**_  
  
“Pratt,” Rook croaked very, very softly, trying to make sure Hudson didn’t hear. “The, uh… The ‘ _dummies._ ’”  
  
She showed him the note. Pratt went pale, and had to brace himself on the desk. “Jesus fucking Christ.”  
  
“Nope,” Hudson said, biting her lip and shaking her head, backing away from one of the mannequins. “Nope, nope, nope, nope, _nope._ I can deal with crazy Peggies, I can deal with wild animals- I can’t deal with this shit anymore. I want out.”  
  
Rook peeked out the window, looking around for any sign of O’Hara- or whoever else had been in the barn. The sun was shining brightly, trees swaying in the breeze, and yet Rook couldn’t have felt creepier if it were thundering in the middle of the night. Staying in the barn wasn’t a good idea, but going out into the woods that _somebody_ had just fled into didn’t sound much better.  
  
“Let me stitch Rook up first,” Pratt said, guiding Rook over to a bale of hay, eyeing the chair and bed-frame with a wrinkled nose. “Just keep an eye on that hatch in case anyone else comes knocking.”  
  
It took about fifteen minutes of Pratt’s stitching and Rook gritting her teeth through the pain before it was over, and by then Hudson was even more antsy than she had been before. “I really, _really_ do not want to be here when he comes back,” She muttered as Pratt helped Rook to her feet. “I’m honestly nervous about even leaving this damn barn without a SWAT shield in front of us.”  
  
“We can head back across the river to Holland Valley,” Rook suggested, wincing as she limped towards the window. “Stay there for the night and head back tomorrow.”  
  
“Might be a little longer than tomorrow,” Pratt muttered, grimacing as he watched her move. “I think it might be better if we bring you to the clinic to get checked out again, just to be sure.”  
  
“Whatever gets us as far away from this barn as quickly as possible, I don’t even care. I’m not coming back here without the National Guard with me.”  
  
“Yeah, well, you might have a bit of a wait then.”  
  
Rook leaned on the edge of the window, looking out into the trees idly as Pratt and Hudson worked out the logistics of where to go and how to get there (they were currently stuck on how to get out of the barn- Hudson wanted to go out the window, claiming the fall wasn’t that far; Pratt wanted to go back through the house to spare Rook the trauma of the fall). She wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just idly scanning the landscape with a mind for any Peggies skulking in the shadows.  
  
And then, suddenly, there he was.  
  
A man stood in the trees, tall and broad and face painted with black streaks. In his hand, he held a cleaver. His eyes, even from this distance, didn’t look right: They were too bright, too sharp, too… _Wrong._  
  
He smiled, raised the hand that held the cleaver and waved.  
  
Rook’s mouth hung open. “Guys?” She said weakly. “ _Guys_.”  
  
She blinked-  
  
-and he was gone.  
  
“Rook? What is it?”  
  
Hudson and Pratt were looking at her inquisitively. They hadn’t seen the man at all- maybe it was O’Hara, maybe not, Rook would have to press them for details about O’Hara’s appearance later. Maybe that was for the best, considering how high-strung Hudson had been about possibly encountering O’Hara so far. She’d probably start firing shots off into the woods at random if Rook mentioned what she’d seen.  
  
“I want to go,” She said instead, not proud of how weak her voice sounded. “Out the window is fine, I’ll live. I just _really_ want to get out of here.”  
  
“You and me both, Rook,” Hudson muttered.  
  
Once out of the barn, they headed back towards the bridge that led to Holland Valley. Rook compulsively looked over her shoulder at the trees as they went, expecting to see the man again. It was maybe the fifth time she looked back when she saw something in the high window of the barn’s front-end, the window Pratt had thought he’d seen someone in when they’d first turned the power on:  
  
The red balloon that had been tied to the desk was now hovering in view behind the bars.  
  
Rook shivered, turned around, and this time did not look back.  
  
-End


End file.
